There is a wonderful line in one of Cicero’s letters to Atticus in which he describes moving into a property and says: I have put out my books and now my house has a soul.
I feel as if I have walked into a mirrored room and glimpsed myself from an unfamiliar angle for the first time. Is that really what I look like? Is that who I am?
Suddenly his face twisted into a sneer. ‘Oh, I can see what you’re thinking, Hartmann. “What a vulgar fellow! A car salesman! And now he fancies himself as a second Bismarck!” But we have done something your kind never managed. We have made Germany great again.’ ‘Actually,’ said Hartmann mildly, ‘I was thinking you have egg on your chin.
The line between accident and suicide isn’t always clearly defined. You could kill yourself without really making up your mind.
History has always fascinated me. As Cicero himself once wrote: ‘To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?’ I quickly forgot the cold and could have spent all day happily unwinding that roll, poring over the events of more than sixty years before.
Really, take it from me: it is always the unknown that is most frightening.
It was like having a child forever at your heels – a persistent, intelligent, embarrassing, deceitful, dangerous child.
So I have a choice: either I am an investigator in that uniform, and try to do a little good; or I am something else without that uniform, and do no good at all.
March had a routine for reading the paper. He started at the back, with the truth. If Leipzig was said to have beaten Cologne four-nil at football, the chances were it was true: even the Party had yet to devise a means of rewriting the sports results. The sports news was a different matter. COUNTDOWN.
It had been a futile gesture, of course, but then they were trapped in an era when futile gestures were all that were available.
Politics is a country idiot capable of concentrating on only one thing at a time.
It was not quite seven and Berlin was alive with possibilities the day had yet to dull.
You can always spot a fool, for he is the man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election. But an election is a living thing – you might almost say, the most vigorously alive thing there is – with thousands upon thousands of brains and limbs and eyes and thoughts and desires, and it will wriggle and turn and run off in directions no one ever predicted, sometimes just for the joy of proving the wiseacres wrong.
You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everyone dances with the grim reaper.
Since when has idiocy been a bar to advancement in politics?
He lived alone, in a small house full of books, and did nothing all day except read and think – a most dangerous occupation for a man, which in my experience leads invariably to dyspepsia and melancholy.
As if earthquakes aren’t as much a part of living in Campania as hot springs and summer droughts!
The library was destroyed years back. My father-in-law used to say nothing burned so well on a cold winter’s night as a good book.
I did not have long to enjoy my freedom in tranquillity. My modest plans, like everyone else’s, were about to be mocked by the immensity of events. As Plautus has it: Whatever the mind may hope for The future is in the hands of the gods.
It was only later that he recognised the folly he had fallen into, a human trait he had long observed: that merely because one wishes to believe in a thing, it does not follow that it is true.
Problems do not queue up outside a statesman’s door, waiting to be solved in an orderly fashion, chapter by chapter, as the books would have us believe; instead they crowd in en masse, demanding attention.